One of the largest sports video game call-to-actions of all time is fans’ insistence that ‘we need another college football game.’ It has been 11 long years since the launch of NCAA Football 14, and this year, Electronic Arts has finally brought the franchise back with EA College Football 25.
A title that took longer to release than former Heisman trophy winner Texas A&M’s Johnny Manziel spent in the NFL (he was the second highest-rated player on the roster in NCAA Football 14). While college football comes back with a fresh coat of paint and far more consistent gameplay than the EA Madden franchise, EA College Football 25 still contends with a myriad of growing pains for its long hiatus.
First off, EA College Football 25 took steps before development to ensure this title lives and breathes college football. To do this, EA brought back NCAA Football 14’s Ben Haumiller, who serves as the principal game designer and has worked with the franchise for over a decade prior.
“EA College Football 25 appears to be a Madden clone on paper, but it’s far more nuanced with 134 school programs.”
That’s not all. EA has also recruited a team from NCAA Revamped, a fan-made modded title (based on the architecture of NCAA Football 14) that has continued to keep NCAA Football alive and updated for the past decade. These choices have undoubtedly kept the college football experience lucid for College Football 25. Welcome decisions like the inclusion of the Revamped team’s RPO style plays gently guide the spirit of NCAA Football 14 and Revamped safely to EA College Football 25.
On paper, EA College Football 25 appears to be a Madden clone, but the truth is it’s a lot more nuanced than that. Madden 24 contains 32 professional teams, whereas College Football 25 contains 134 school programs with a philosophy of “every team is somebody’s favourite.” This is a double-edged sword for EA. When massive programs like LSU take the field, their tiger mascot is seen dancing in full wardrobe and more care is given to pregame animations. However, when a relatively unknown school takes the field, a stock animation of a cheerleader being thrown in the air plays, and it is the same animation for every school that didn’t make the ‘mascot inclusion’ cut.
This makes the entire pre-game animation seem as though it is still in beta. With no option to skip these animations, they also become a hindrance quickly. But, while it is an awesome concept that 134 schools are here, what separates most of them is boiled down to letters on jerseys and numerical digits on their backs (and numerical ratings). While all colleges in real life aren’t equal — Alabama’s Crimson Tide is more prominent than the Syracuse Orange — this makes it a bit of a drag to use smaller schools in longer game modes like Dynasty, considering that the cursed animation will play every single game.
“The training mode presented in College Football 25 is the best in football video game history.”
However, Dynasty Mode is back in College Football 25 and better than what is presented in the EA Madden franchise. Instead of using salary caps and monetary recruitment methods that make playing a video game feel like budgeting for groceries (but instead, it’s football players), you’re tasked with recruiting the nation’s best prospects by luring them to your program with incentives like scholarships, which is similar to how the real-life recruitment process goes. Here, you can spend more of your hour currency to sweeten the pot for each prospect. You can dig into their social accounts, and even go as far as to contact their families.
If the courtship of a specific player goes south, they can choose to lock your program out of recruiting them further. A massive lock icon over the player denotes the equivalent of being blocked by an ill-fitting suitor on Facebook. Dynasty can be taken online, and friends can get in on this ‘swooning player’s’ action amongst themselves, which can create some tense moments when a prospect decides to go to your school rather than a friend’s. This gives a true Dynasty experience and is the best football Dynasty mode since NCAA Football 14.
College Football 25 also has a copy-and-paste ‘MyPlayer’ mode named Road to Glory. This is where you can really create your own legacy as a player from five separate positions. You can select the highest action positions from the game to play: Quarterback, Running Back, Wide Receiver, Middle Linebacker, and Cornerback. Customization is also robust here when compared to the ‘create a coach’ in Dynasty. You can fix all facets of the player’s appearance and choose the number they wear. For a coach, you can choose whether they wear a windbreaker or not and select from a few presets, and that’s all.
As a ‘student-athlete,’ EA boasted players must keep their grades up to keep playing for the program. This amounts to a measly 2.0 GPA to hit to stay active, and the way players study is by pressing ‘study’ on the player screen and spending energy. This is far less impactful than EA described. You have to severely neglect hitting study to fall below a 2.0 (basically never show up), and honestly, it just feels like a function stapled to the side of the game. A lot of time is spent in EA College Football 25’s confusing menus, and the study function extends this in a bad way.
Players are given ‘energy,’ and it is spent in this mode to perform these basic actions (like studying). They even rest from a large training session to stave off injury. EA College Football 25 implemented a wear-and-tear dynamic during gameplay, where a tired player has wear on individual joints, reducing their effectiveness. This is a smart game design and is implemented well in every aspect of gameplay. I was able to substitute a severely fatigued running back to bring in his backup, and they appeared to be more spry than the player that played the previous three quarters.
While Road to Glory does give fans a way to immerse themselves as a player in College Football 25, the whole mode feels undercooked and is a way for EA to say the mode exists. While Road to Glory does focus on specific facets of gameplay which can be played to get better overall at College Football 25, such as secondary coverage as a CB, there are training modes — that don’t require studying — that do a better job at teaching skills to players unfamiliar with the game’s systems.
“College Football 25 is a massive step in the right direction for the franchise due to all of the ‘football fan-friendly’ additions.”
The training mode presented in College Football 25 is the best in football video game history. EA gives players a slew of mini-games to complete that sneakily make the player better overall at College Football 25 without saying ‘This is a tutorial’ or without feeling like one. Target trainers, coverage skeleton activities, and even special teams are explored here and completing these mini-games can make a player much better at a football game than just chucking and praying.
What makes College Football 25 stand out from Madden 24 and even other College Football titles is the gameplay. Selecting plays feels excellent, and AI is as smooth as ever. If a certain play works against a higher difficulty CPU — like a Read Option — the CPU will wisen to player habits and stop you dead in your tracks. I have a fundamental problem with throwing the ball up the middle to the tight end, and the CPU picked up on that and picked me off many times. This helps the player grow as well, to not continually make the same mistake over and over.
On the contrary, ‘coach-suggested’ plays are influenced by AI habits as well. If a certain team performs badly against a run on 3rd down, coach suggestions will be loaded with run-heavy approaches on third down. College Football 25 makes the player feel like they have a clipboard of information at their fingertips the entire time, and due to this, it functions far more consistently than all other football games that have come before it.
Each play is like a crucible of information and how to strategically navigate it to make the right choices, as opposed to a ‘maybe this will work’ approach. College Football 25 is a massive step in the right direction for the franchise due to all of the ‘football fan-friendly’ additions they have made. For the first time in my history of playing a football video game, having prior knowledge of the sport felt like an advantage rather than more useless information, and I dig this.
College Football 25 is a great football game. In the 11-year hiatus, EA has put together the best minds behind college football game development to deliver what feels like the first title in the franchise. While heavy inspirations are felt from EA’s Madden and NCAA Football franchises, College Football 25 stands out by feeling like half a sports game and half a real-time strategy title with how hands-on everything is.
While general football gameplay is superb, awful menu design plagues each mode in College Football 25. The Road to Glory mode as a whole is underbaked and feels rushed out when compared to the rest of the game. Overall, UI decisions cloud the screen with way more information than is necessary at times and can make the whole experience feel overwhelming.
While none of my issues while playing are game-breaking, College Football 25 has the rare advantage of being what feels like a complete reset of a franchise, which works in its favour. While College Football 25 is a massive step in the right direction for good video game football play, there is still a lot of work to be done.
